Dealing With Content Spam

EMail Spam is against the law, however, it still fills your inbox. However, content Spam, which is on the rise, is not technically against the law or at least has less liability for those who do it. As a result many of us are constantly cleaning forums and blogs from this kind of trash. This tutorial will help you deal with the majority of Content Spam.

1. Restrict Comments to Some Boards
You can usually turn some boards off from comments as they are not necessarily where you want people to place comments anyway. This may even take a redesign of your blog so that you have fewer boards where they post. True, this does not stop Content Spam, however, it does cause them to recognize that the forum or blog is under supervision and being watched.
2. Require a Review on New Accounts
This is one thing I found very useful. When a new account signs up one way to check them is to take the IP Address that they registered from and put that in the Google search. If they ar known Spammers you will see a whole list of links about people complaining about these known Spammers. Then just ban the IP Address, the email and the account forever.
3. Create a Firewall to Limit Access
I basically became so frustrated with Content Spam I reviewed almost 8 million IP Addresses and subnets and created a list of the most frequent offenders. This is a very aggressive list and it certainly has subnets that contain some innocent users, but I put this together to stop Spam…period.

If you are using a CPanel you can enter subnets like you see below in the Firewall Options.

If you are using an iptables script you can add this section toward the top of the firewall:
You will need to create a file called /etc/rc.d/banned and list subnets one line at a time as you see in the example below.

Again, these subnets include some IPs that should not be in there but it is easier to ban a subnet than to create 750 lines of code for the 8 million addresses I reviewed. Use at your own risk.

Worse Case Scenario: What to do when Comment Spam gets out of control.1. Stop All Comments
Once you stop comments you will see that there is no point for Spammers. You must only use this as a temporary situation as it will not fix anything, it only gives you time to adapt a new strategy.

2. Stop All New Accounts
Again, this is temporary. Place a message in the blog or forum telling people that it is temporary and then work on a permanent solution, most people will understand especially if you tell them that it is only for 48 hours, etc.